


Invictus

by CandlesInTheWell



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Sea
Genre: Other, The Liberation of Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-11 10:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16473911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CandlesInTheWell/pseuds/CandlesInTheWell
Summary: The lights go out.





	Invictus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).



> Sorry about the reveals problems.

When the lights go out, the Voracious Diplomat is ensconced in their office with a bottle of mediocre Greyfields and a stack of reports, preparing for a slow night in. There’s no warning when it happens, no clamor or seeping dread or wave of rioters, the way they’d half imagined there must be when a city dies. One moment, they’re scanning a document on the movements of Khanagian ships in the central zee, and the next, without a sound or breath of wind, the world goes black. They curse and fumble for a match and candle – no good. The fire burns hot but gives no light, and they have a second to hope grimly that it’s only blindness. Then there’s a cry from the gym below, and the splintering noise of a carriage collision, and they know that everything they’ve done – every duplicity small and great, every compromise of conscience – has been useless. So is the next match they strike, and the one after, in vain hope and perseveration. The Night has come. They’ve failed.

They don’t panic. They’re good at that. They found their way once in pitch darkness through the sewers beneath Port Carnelian, and came out of that adventure with hardly a scratch. The only difference now is that they’re not being hunted through knee-deep foul water by a Presbyterate assassin with an objection to their choice of business associates, and to their table habits, for all they know.

(Untrue. The difference is that there will be no light to return to. But they don’t panic.)

They take up their weapons instead, and start walking: out of their office and down the stairs, past the gymnasium and eastward toward the docks. They don’t count steps. That would only lead them wrong. They’ve walked this route – how many times? Enough to know every cobble beneath their feet, to keep time in heartbeats instead of footfalls. Enough to find their way in the dark.

The city outside is chaos, a cacophony of gunshots and shattering glass split by the screams of humans and horses. Ignore all that, they tell themself, except to navigate by. Ignore the blood on the air, and the weeping. And go quietly – there will be things hunting in the dark, more voracious than they have ever been. Do not stop for pity or duty, and waste no time on supplies; things will be difficult, but they can be difficult later. There’s only one person who matters now.

They find the path by touch and by smell and a spy’s honed memory: rough brick beneath their fingers, butcher shops and bakeries, the cloying fragrance of some wealthy gentleperson’s sporing garden. The smell of the zee, when they get close enough. When they lose the way, it’s that they follow, and it’s a bitter joke that something so known for fickleness is all they have to lead them true. But lead them it does, south and east on aching legs until they stumble back onto streets they recognize by the salt-and-rot scent and the creaking wood beneath their feet. This is where they need to be. The Dark-Spectacled Admiral might have had a townhouse in the heart of luxury, had he chosen, but it’s here he lives – _here_ , at last, on a street that ends in a jetty, where just that morning ships might have been seen coming in from every port in the Neath. The Admiral loves the zee, and he loves the small house he keeps at the edge of it, where London stops being London and becomes something else.

 _Unless_ , the Diplomat thinks, still not panicking, that love is as past-tense as every other will be soon in this merciless _Liberation_. There’s no sign of either danger or habitation. The gate in the wall is latched but not locked, the path to the house empty, and there’s no screaming on the other side of the plain oak door, nor any weeping. There might be a man sitting silent in a lightless parlor, and if so, then the Diplomat knows that man well enough to make sight irrelevant; every detail is there for them to imagine: the steepled fingers, the tight-set mouth, the head bowed in defeat. The Admiral is a man accustomed to defeat, and accustomed to surviving it. In that, after all their games and stalemates, he might finally have the advantage.

Or there might be no one. The Admiral might be gone into the streets, and if he is, there will be no finding him again in that city soon to be made ruin. He might be gone into deeper darkness still. 

But there’s no point wondering, though the Diplomat’s throat is tight with something not yet grief. Knock, they order themself, then enter. Take the chance.

“Admiral,” they say, speaking lightly, and they know he’s there by the sharp gasp and the sound of something metallic clattering to the floor. A pistol, maybe. Some other weapon discarded. They hear him rise in a rustle of stiff cloth, and cross the room with measured footsteps.

(He will be counting. They know this about him: that everything is counted, accounted for, whether it will matter in the end or not.)

They meet at the door. The Admiral pulls the Diplomat into the room, and the Diplomat follows, stepping closer. The city sounds are distant now, or unimportant; the teeth of the darkness aren’t so sharp. The Admiral smells like soap and tobacco, boot polish and leather, like a living person in a city full of death. They run their fingers across his weathered face, over deep lines scored by age and pain, and this time, standing rigid beneath their touch, he allows it. He never has before, but many things are permitted in darkness, and after everything else has been lost. And it’s hard to say if he’s the one shaking or the Diplomat is, or maybe both – yes, both. The Diplomat is not incapable of being honest, when no one can see them, and if the Admiral realizes, it’s not the only weakness of theirs he keeps a tally of. They know each other. They’re not adversaries any longer.

“What now?” the Diplomat asks, not expecting an answer.

“Wine,” the Admiral says, with the brittle calm of a man attending his own execution. “I’ve been saving a bottle of the Broken Giant. Why not a celebration, before it all ends?”

And the Diplomat laughs – half cheer and half bitterness, a touch of madness for flavor.

“Nothing ends, my dear,” they say. “It only changes. But yes, let’s have the wine, and empty out your liquor cabinet and your pantry. Let’s have satin sheets and what we’ve both been wanting. And after that, when we’ve burned through every pleasure left to us – ” They laugh again, unwilling to say what the Admiral must also be thinking. And they keep laughing, raggedly enough to frighten themself, until they find themself stilled by the heat of the Admiral’s hands on their arms and the reminder that there are still things not wholly composed of night and nightmare. Things worth fighting for, maybe, though the Diplomat wouldn’t place much faith in their chances.

“After that?” the Admiral says. His hands are trembling still, but his tired voice carries the strength of command. “After that, we survive.”

“We survive,” the Diplomat concurs – and they _do_ want to live, even now, even like this. It’s a terrible habit, but terribly hard to break, and if life hasn’t seen fit to kill them yet, they mean to keep it that way. So they tilt their head up, listening for a moment to the sound of the Admiral’s breathing, and they step forward again.

Most of their promises have made in blood, in one sense or another. This one, they seal with a kiss.


End file.
